Musings: JetBlue

We went on the road last week for a few days, courtesy of JetBlue. We often  use JetBlue, enjoying their combination of features. We don’t normally do trip reports, but as we sat there, many things occurred to us, and we thought we’d assemble them into this post.

We tried, on previous flights, to print a lineup for JetBlue’s 36 channels of DirecTV, but it didn’t work. An email to the company did not result in repair. But a quick response to a Twitter about DirecTV by JetBlue produced a repair, and when we checked today, you can once again print a lineup and prepare your watching in advance.

We have had wonderful experiences with some JetBlue employees, and some more tepid ones. It hasn’t hurt our enjoyment of the airline, nor have any criticisms or observations we made. Our flight started at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a small station for JetBlue. Any problems at LaGuardia are due to the age and configuration of the Central Terminal, which hopefully someday will be replaced, or the congestion at LaGuardia itself. For more information on that, click here for a good analysis from the NY Daily News excerpted from a piece from GQ.

The flight terminated in Ft. Lauderdale, where JetBlue has a much more extensive operation and operates out of the newest terminal, so no problem there.

JetBlue uses the same boarding procedure as most carriers. Board by row/zone. We have seen them use a rear boarding/deplaning procedure at Ft. Lauderdale, but not recently. The option of opening a rear entrance and letting passengers board in two places seems to be a way of speeding the process, but there are logistic issues.

When we boarded on the return, we were stopped for a moment at the front entrance while others got settled, and noticed a list of yellow stickers on the control panel to the left of the door. Our eye skimmed it, and when two nearby passengers noticed their backseat TVs were unresponsive, we recalled seeing their seat numbers there, indicating the crew was already aware of the problem, although we do not know for how long.  We did not look at this on the way out, where the entire three seats opposite us were down.

We always try to be prepared, and offered to switch but ended up being turned down, as we keep emergency entertainment in our bag. We expect to hit the malfunctioning In Flight Entertainment lottery sometime or another. We would have liked to see the flight crew get involved…especially if they knew in advance. Making an announcement asking if anyone would switch…offering a free pillow or drink coupon, or some token gesture would be a useful move.

Speaking of announcements, we were somewhat amused when on the way back, the flight attendant doing the announcements couldn’t remember the names of the pilot and co-pilot, and had to go check. The formulaic nature of announcements on many carriers leads to passengers not paying attention. We believe that is why Southwest encourages creativity from its staff. We arrived into our destination cities late at night, after which there where no connecting flights, yet we still got reminded that if ____ was our final destination, which it had to be. And we are always told the local time is ____ when we haven’t changed timezones. We’d like to see JetBlue encouraging their staff to personalize the messages while still maintaining the information they need to.

Which brings us back to the IFE. JetBlue owns LiveTV, the company that installs and maintains these systems. Newer versions of them ae being installed by LiveTV on other carriers. We can see why JetBlue is not going to commit to revamping all its planes right now, but there are some things about the current system we’d like to see modified. For one, the LiveMap channel.

The LiveMap channel is a dynamically generated channel that alternates images of plane location, speed, and altitude with Jetblue themed ads. We’d love it if JetBlue could mix this with the XM Satellite Radio feed it offers. At the least, this could be done by having audio playback from the last XM channel navigated to in the XM interface play on the LiveMap channel. To go to a higher extent, the two could be merged so that the channel and current playing song information show in a bar on the LiveMap. Speaking of information bars, why can’t the LiveMap information they show be done split-screen with the advertisements? If one is watching a channel to be able to look up periodically and see where the plane is and how it is doing, it seems annoying to make someone wait a minute or two to actually see this information. A simple information bar showing progress at the bottom of the screen during the ads, interspersed with full screen maps, would be much more useful. Other options, if technically possible, could be adding in distance from destination and estimated duration of the remainder of the flight.

Other aspects of JetBlue worth enjoying: Relatively friendly staff, good selection of snacks, etc.

In the end, Jetblue does things in a way we can appreciate. They were efficient, and friendly, and they have more average legroom than other carriers(tall people like us like legroom). We look forward to their future expansion.

As always, we welcome comments.